Under the Black Flag Read online

  First, Captain Bartholomew Sharp with his company had a red flag, with a bunch of white and green ribbons. The second division, led by Captain Richard Sawkins with his men, had a red flag striped with yellow. The third and fourth, led by Captain Peter Harris, had two green flags, his company being divided into several divisions. The fifth and sixth, led by Captain John Coxon … made two divisions and had each of them a red flag. The seventh was led by Captain Edmund Cook, with red colours striped with yellow, with a hand and sword for his device. All or most of them were armed with fuzee, pistol, and hangar.

  It is notable that most of the flags were red or red with stripes. The hand and sword device used by Edmund Cook later appears on the pirate flags of Thomas Tew and Christopher Moody, and is among several symbols shown on an eighteenth-century illustration of the Barbary corsairs’ flag.

  The Anglo-American pirates followed in the wake of the buccaneers of the West Indies, and it is among them that the black flag with its symbols of death became established. One of the earliest accounts is a reference in the trial of Captain John Quelch, who was executed with his pirate crew at Boston in 1702: “Three months later the pirates were off the coast of Brazil flying as a flag the Old Roger which was ornamented by an anatomy with an hourglass in one hand, and a dart in the heart with three drops of blood proceeding from it in the other.” This is one of the earliest mentions of the term “Old Roger,” which later became the Jolly Roger. There are differing theories about the origins of the term. One theory is that it was an anglicized version of “Jolie rouge,” used to describe the red or bloody flag. Another theory suggests that it came from Ali Raja, the name of a Tamil pirate captain who operated in the Indian Ocean. A third and perhaps more convincing theory is that it was derived from the nickname for the devil, which was “Old Roger.”

  In the year 1717 there are a number of detailed references to the flags flown by pirates operating in the West Indies and along the American coast. A report in the Boston News Letter of August 12, 1717, describes how Captain Nathaniel Brooker in the snow Restoration was attacked by two pirate sloops while en route from London to Boston. One of the sloops was commanded by Captain Napin, “who had in his flag a Deaths Head and an hour glass”; the other vessel was commanded by Captain Nichols, “who had in his flag a dart and a bleeding heart.” During the trial of the pirates from Sam Bellamy’s crew, reference is made to the confession of Thomas Baker, who was examined on May 6, 1717. Baker said that Bellamy’s men “spread a large black flag, with a death’s head and bones across and gave chase to Captain Prince under the same colours.” A description of a similar image but in black on a white ground appears on the flyleaf of a well-worn edition of Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. The handwritten inscription reads: “Septr. 28th: 1717 at 8 in the morning in ye Lat. of 32′8′ about 160 Leag: west from Madaira we were attacked by a French Pyratt with Death’s head in black in ye middle of a white ensign, and by the Providence of God were delivered.”

  From this date onward we find constant references to piratical flags. Most of them are black with white symbols, but red flags continue. When Blackbeard’s squadron attacked the Protestant Caesar in the Bay of Honduras in 1718, two of the pirate ships flew black flags with death’s-heads and three ships flew red flags. Since fiction has so often proved more effective than fact in establishing pirate images, it is worth noting that Defoe included two descriptions of pirate flags in Captain Singleton, published in 1720, the year after Robinson Crusoe. Before going into action in the Indian Ocean, the pirates hoist a black flag with two cross daggers, and on another occasion they fly “the black flag or ancient at the poop and the bloody flag at the topmasthead.”

  So confident were they of overcoming their victims that pirates usually had no need to use false flags or other deceptions when they made their attacks. Their confidence was based on the knowledge that they were superior in firepower and in numbers of men, and on the terrifying reputation which they had acquired, and indeed cultivated. Few merchant seamen had any experience of battle, and being attacked by a pirate ship was like being attacked by a naval warship—with the added threat of torture and death for any survivors. Some pirates added to the terror of their first approach by hurling lethal missiles at their victim. In December 1718 Governor Lawes of Jamaica sent out two sloops to capture a pirate ship commanded by Captain Thompson, who had had the nerve to take a merchant ship within sight of Port Royal harbor. The first sloop to reach the pirates was shocked into submission when the pirates “threw vast numbers of powder flasks, granado shells, and stinkpots into her which killed and wounded several and made others jump overboard.”26 The second sloop was so demoralized by the attack that she fled back to harbor.

  “Granado shells” (also called grenadoes) were an early form of hand grenade and were in common use by 1700. The name was derived from the Spanish word granada, meaning “pomegranate.” They were also called “powder flasks.” The grenades used by the pirates were hollow balls weighing about two ounces. They were made of iron or wood and filled with gunpowder. They had a touch hole and a fuse which was lit before the grenade was thrown among the seamen on the deck of the merchant ship. The resulting explosion was designed to cause death and injury, and could totally demoralize a crew with no experience of battle. It is interesting to note that fifteen grenades have been excavated from the wreck of the pirate ship Whydah.

  Equally frightening but more devastating in its effect was the broadside. This was rarely used by pirates because they did not want to damage a potential prize, but they had no hesitation in firing a broadside if they needed to blast a victim into submission. Captain John Frost was chased for twelve hours by a pirate ship in July 1717. It was nine o’clock in the evening when the pirates drew alongside. The pirate ship, which was commanded by the Frenchman Captain La Bouse, had twenty guns and a crew of 170. She fired a broadside of “double round and partridges, and a volley of small shot,”27 which meant that each of the ten guns on one side of the ship was loaded with two round cannonballs and a bag of partridge shot. This would have been a lethal combination at close range, and it was accompanied by a volley of fire from the muskets and pistols. The bombardment beat the men off the deck and so shattered the hull, rigging, and sails of Frost’s ship that he surrendered without a fight.

  Pirates did not appreciate a brave resistance from a merchant ship, but expected and demanded instant surrender. On February 15, 1718, Captain Robert Leonard was in latitude 23° in the vicinity of the Bahamas and heading northwest when a ship approached and fired two shots over his vessel. Captain Leonard hove to and was commanded to come on board the pirate ship at once, or they would fire a broadside into his vessel. When he reached the deck of the pirate ship, Captain Leonard was beaten with a cutlass by Edward England, the pirate captain, “for not bringing to at the first shot.”28

  If a merchant ship surrendered without a fight, the pirates usually refrained from inflicting violence on the crew. Indeed, some pirates were almost gentlemanly in their behavior. Captain Stone, who was taken by a pirate called Jennings, reported that he was treated civilly and told that the pirates did not hurt Englishmen. They restricted their looting to twenty gallons of rum, for which they paid him handsomely. Thomas Knight was a member of the ship Mountserrat Merchant which encountered three ships off the island of Nevis on November 29, 1717. Not realizing that they were pirates, Knight and three other seamen rowed across in the ship’s longboat to inquire whether they had any letters (it was common practice in the days of sail for ships in foreign waters to pass on letters and news of events back home). As they came alongside, they saw that one of the ships had a flag at her stern with the death’s-head on it. The pirates commanded them to come aboard, and when they reluctantly did so, the first words of the pirates were “You are welcome on board.” They were then invited to eat, but refused. The pirates did not take kindly to this, however, and before they would let them go, they interrogated them on the number of guns in the forts i
n the area.29

  In the great majority of cases merchant ships surrendered without a fight when attacked by pirates. However, there were a few occasions when a courageous captain with a loyal crew fought back. In 1710 a small galley from Liverpool was attacked by a French privateer when she was a day out from Antigua. The captain of the galley covered his decks with broken bottles, and when the privateer came up, he fired his chase guns at him in such a way that “he made a lane fore and aft on the Frenchman’s decks.”30 The privateer kept going and managed to board the galley, but the combined effect of the broken bottles and the volley of fire from the defenders forced the pirates to flee the deck of the galley and abandon the attack.

  A particularly violent episode was described by John Philmore of Ipswich, who was captured by a pirate schooner at Newfoundland in August 1723.31 The pirate schooner was under the command of John Phillips with a small crew which included John Nut, the master, and James Sparks, the gunner. After taking and looting several ships in Newfoundland, the pirates sailed south to the West Indies. Some miles north of Tobago they captured the sloop of Andrew Harradine. The captured men decided to overcome the pirates and agreed to make their move at midday. The carpenter brought up his tools and laid them out on deck on pretense of working with them. At the given moment the carpenter got hold of Nut, master of the pirates, who was walking on deck, and threw him overboard. Harradine took up the carpenter’s adze and struck down another pirate with a blow to his head. John Philmore struck a further victim “with the broad axe as he was cleaning his arms and killed him at the first stroke.” Sparks, the gunner, was killed and thrown overboard, and the fight was over.

  In the attack on the Princes Galley described at the beginning of this chapter, it was noted that the pirates forced two men, a carpenter’s mate and a surgeon’s mate, to join them. The capture and forcible detention of skilled men was a regular feature of pirate attacks. The pirates had no difficulty in recruiting ordinary seamen to their ranks, but they also needed men with specialist skills. Of these the most in demand were the carpenters and coopers. In a naval warship the carpenter was one of the most valued men on board. He had usually served as an apprentice in a shipyard and was a qualified shipwright. He was responsible for the maintenance of all the wooden parts of the ship, which included most of the structure from the keel to the masts and spars. Since the strains on a ship in heavy weather were considerable, the carpenter was constantly busy, but he really came into his own during and after a battle, when he and his mate would be called on to patch up holes in the hull, repair damaged gear, and replace broken spars. On a pirate ship in the Caribbean with no access to shipyards, the carpenter was even more crucial. The intense heat, alternating with tropical downpours, caused seams to open and wood to rot. As well as the growth of seaweed and barnacles, the warm water encouraged attacks from the teredo worm, making regular careening vital to the security of the ship.

  The cooper was less essential for the safety of the ship but was a key figure in the provision of victuals for the crew. Apart from the live animals and chickens, virtually all the food and drink in a sailing ship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was stored in barrels. A cross section through a merchant ship or a warship would show most of the lower part of the vessel filled with barrels of various sizes; there were barrels for beef, biscuit, water, beer, wine, and spirits. The cooper made the barrels and repaired them and played an important part in provisioning the ship.

  So when the pirates took a ship, they were on the lookout for these skilled craftsmen. When the snow Barbados Merchant was taken by the pirate Farrington Spriggs in October 1724, “they forced John Bibby the mate, John Jones the carpenter, and Richard Fleet the cooper.”32 James Blois, the carpenter of the ship Wade Frigate, was inevitably picked out by the French pirates who attacked his ship in February 1718. When interviewed later, he reported that “the said pirates forced and detained him this deponent on board their vessel as carpenter for about six months.”33 When Blackbeard took the sloop Margaret in December 1717, only two men were forced to join the pirates; one of them was Edward Latter, a cooper.

  The most dramatic account of the pirates’ need for such skilled men appears in the Boston Gazette for November 29, 1725. The sloop Fancy was en route from Boston to the West Indies when she was approached by a pirate sloop called the Sea Nymph commanded by Philip Lyne. On seeing her black flag and realizing she was a pirate, Ebenezer Mower “shewed more concern than any of us, crying and saying he was sure they would force him because he was a cooper.” Mower was a Boston man, thirty years of age, “of short stature, thin favoured, and dark complexion,” and he had good reason to be worried. No sooner had the pirates taken the ship than they decided to force Mower to join them. The methods which they used left him with little choice:

  One of the pirates struck Mower many blows on his head with the helve of an axe, whereby his head was much bruised and bloodied, after which the same pirate forced him said Mower to lay his head down on the coamings of the hatch, and lifting the axe over his head swore that if he did not sign their Articles immediately, he would chop his head off, the said Mower begging hard for his life. After this the same pirate carried said Mower into the Round House where they continued a short time, and said Mower coming out told the declarant and other prisoners that he was ruined and undone, for they forced him to sign their Articles.

  There is no record of what happened to Mower. One hopes he did not meet the same fate as Richard Luntly, a carpenter who was captured by the pirate Howell Davis when his ship was on the Guinea coast of Africa. After many adventures, Luntly found himself among the crew of pirates led by Bartholomew Roberts, “and we that were forced men were compelled by the force of arms to do things that our conscience thought to be unlawful.”34 One night he and the other forced men were planning to take the ship and head for the West Indies when they were overheard by one of the pirates. They were reported to Roberts and his quartermaster, “and immediately all hands were called up to know what they should do with us, some of them was for shooting us, others not, and so they consented to put us away upon a desolate island.” Rescued from the island by a ship bound for Britain, poor Luntly was hauled before an Admiralty Court in Scotland and condemned to death for piracy. He was hanged on the shore at Leith on January 11, 1721.

  On november 3, 1724, a savage act of mutiny took place on board a ship called the George Galley while she was en route from Santa Cruz in the Canary Islands to the Strait of Gibraltar. At ten o’clock at night, seven members of the crew launched a bloodthirsty attack. The surgeon, the chief mate, and the clerk were set upon while they slept and had their throats cut. Captain Oliver Ferneau, an elderly man with a reputation for being mean and peevish, was up on deck. Two of the mutineers seized him and attempted to throw him overboard, but he put up a fight and escaped from their clutches. He found himself confronted by another mutineer holding a knife which was red with blood from the butchery carried out below. The captain was slashed in the throat, recaptured, and as he struggled, he was shot at close range with a pistol. While he lay dying, the other three victims managed to crawl up onto the deck, bleeding profusely from their wounds. Daniel McCawley, the clerk, asked the mutineers to let him live long enough to say his prayers. “Damn you,” he was told, “this is no time to pray.” He was shot dead along with the other wounded men. The four bodies were heaved over the side.

  The leader of the mutiny was John Gow, alias John Smith, a thirty-five-year-old Scotsman.1 He was an experienced seaman and had served on men-of-war as well as merchant ships. He had joined the George Galley at Rotterdam a few months before and been appointed second mate and gunner. He had selected the twenty-gun merchant ship with the deliberate intention of inciting a mutiny and taking over command of the vessel.

  Following the murder of Captain Ferneau and his officers, Gow and his accomplices forced the rest of the crew to turn pirate. The ship was renamed the Revenge, and they set off on a voyage of plunder. They took
several merchantmen off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and then held a council to decide whether to head for the West Indies, the Guinea coast, or Scotland. Gow had been born near Thurso on the northeast coast of Scotland, but had moved with his father to Stromness on the mainland of Orkney. He knew that the great natural harbor of Scapa Flow in the Orkneys would provide shelter during the winter gales, as well as deserted beaches where they could safely careen their ship. He therefore persuaded the crew to head for Scotland, and told them that they would pretend to be honest merchantmen driven north by the weather.

  They arrived in the Orkney Islands toward the end of January 1725 and anchored “under the lee of a small island at some distance from Cariston.” Gow went ashore to visit a young woman he had been courting before he had gone to sea. She was evidently impressed that he was now the captain of a ship, and agreed to marry him. But then everything began to go wrong. A young member of Gow’s crew gave the pirate ringleaders the slip, hired a horse, and rode to Kirkwall, the capital town of the Orkneys, where he warned the magistrates that there was a pirate ship in the vicinity. Twelve other members of the crew escaped in the ship’s longboat and made their way to the Scottish mainland, where they too alerted the authorities. Although he knew the alarm had been raised, Gow sent his men to plunder the house of the local sheriff before weighing anchor and sailing to the small island of Cava. There they abducted three women. According to one account, the women were “kept on board some time, and used so inhumanly, that when they set them on shore again, they were not able to go or to stand; and we hear that one of them died on the beach where they left them.”2